May 1, 2011

It’s waterfall being touted as the best way to do web development! Seriously!? Who wrote this article? Wait a second while I look…. Oh, it’s the CEO of Ektron, the makers of Ektron CMS. A product so good that the only times I’ve heard of it has been from companies that bought it, got screwed by poor service, bad documentation, horrible support and the vendor’s inability to supply updates in a timely manner, and that have then written it off as a mistake, and then kicked it out so it can be replaced by other commercial products or solutions from that most waterfall-ish of development environments, the open source world! This explains so much!

It seriously annoys me that people write this sort of article as if it’s the one true way and even more when a publisher like ZDNet doesn’t include a public health warning with it.

This isn’t to say agile is the only way to do web development either, not by a long shot. Agile is a mechanism that has been shown to work well in web development and we’ve seen time and again that short development cycles and rapid, continuous releases are a path to success. The real secret to success though? Find the best people you can, educate them in how to best communicate with you and each other, then tell them what you want and then get the hell out of their way!

Individuals and interactions over process and tools.

I think I need to take an aspirin and go have a lie down. Reading that article gave me a small aneurism.